NO OTHER CHOICE***** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 9

Pantheon director Park Chan Wook returns to our screens with the darkest of black comedies and social satires. It’s hilarious and occasionally deeply moving and sends a dire warning to all of us wage-slaves. And all with his trademark audacious and assured visual and aural style. The film is the third that I have seen in as many days where a family patriarch is so ashamed at being unable to financially provide for his wife and kids that he turns to a life of crime. After the feckless and self-involved JB Mooney (Josh O’Connor) in THE MASTERMIND and the charming but rogueish Jeffrey Manchester (Channing Tatum) in ROOFMAN we now get Man Soo (Lee Byung-Hun) in NO OTHER CHOICE. After decades working in a paper factory, itself an obsolete industry, he is laid off by the new American owners who use the platitude that they had “no other choice”. A year later and his house is about to be foreclosed, his wife is supporting the family, and his daughter can’t have cello lessons. They’ve even had to give up the dogs! Every job opening has a bevy of over-qualified men applying. So Man-Soo grabs his father’s old service revolver and takes a KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS approach to his problems. 

There is nothing that I didn’t love about this film. Its 2hr20 min running time went by in a flash. I loved its clear-eyed, heartbreaking depiction of middle-aged men discarded by society and its dire warning of what a fully automated AI-powered factory would look like. I loved its clear depiction of the social pressures on men in a misogynistic patriarchal society, whether young or old. I loved all of the acting performances. Both Lee Byung-Hun (JOINT SECURITY AREA) and Son Ye-Jin as his wife are superb. But most of all this film works because of how Director Park handles comedy - especially absurdist physical comedy - and uses music. The first truly violent scene goes on forever and is set to overloud schmaltzy Korean pop music. It’s funny but it also tells us so much about the emotional psychodrama in the marriage it is depicting. This is cinema at its finest, its most complex, and its most entertaining.  

NO OTHER CHOICE has a running time of 139 minutes. It played Venice, Busan, Toronto and London. It does not yet have a commercial release date in the USA or UK but was released in South Korea in September.

BLINDNESS - doesn't earn the right to include such graphic footage

BLINDNESS is an elongated metaphor for the loneliness people feel in modern society. It shows us a world, very much like our own, where people are essentially self-interested and "blind" to the feelings of others. This manifests itself in a strange plague that turns everyone blind, except for a Doctor's wife (Julianne Moore). The blind are herded into prisons, where savagery takes over. Gael Garcia Bernal's character establishes himself as a tyrant. Woman are forced to submit to rape in order to survive.

The rape scenes are, as they should be, hard to watch. I have no truck with this in principle. One of the best movies I've ever scene is Gaspar Noe's IRREVERSIBLE, which features one of the most graphic and unendurable rape scenes in film. The difference is that IRREVERSIBLE earned the right to show that scene by placing it in context and showing how it affected all concerned. It was a crucial part of a brilliant film. By contrast, BLINDNESS never really works as a film.  I didn;t engage with characters - there was no real plot - or at least, I didn't understand why characters took the decisions they did, so that the plot seemed implausible - and worst of all, the "big idea" is rather obvious.  That the director, Fernando Mireilles feels it necessary to hit us over the head with it us is simply unfortunate. It's simply a rather patronising, obvious, pedagogical exercise. 

BLINDNESS played Cannes and Toronto 2008 and was released earlier this year in Brazil, the US, Belgium, France, Greece, Mexico, Chile, Germany, Peru, Singapore, Panama, Argentina, Israel, Portugal, South Korea, Finland, the Netherlands, Russia, the UK and Japan. It opens in Venezuela on December 19th and in Italy on March 6th.